Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/107

settle. "Though the term 'specific gravity' was unknown to her, she seems to have seized upon this principle in order to gather out the elements desired. This fine paste will not make pottery; it will crack badly in drying and baking. But our ceramic worker is equal to the occasion, and long ago had discovered, as every archaeologist knows, that sand or some other tempering material must be added. The oldest fragments yet discovered reveal in their texture grains of sand, put there by Nature or by the potter, bits of pulverized shells, or the remains of old pots ground fine and worked over into new vessels." She sorts material for coarser and for finer ware, turns it with her hand, guided by her eye, molds it around or within some object to give it shape, using gourds, nets, or baskets for the purpose, whose forms and peculiar markings are thus preserved, and arrives at the stage of

Fig. 9.—Eskimo Mothers. (After Healy.)

making pottery like basketry, for which she rolls out a slender cylinder of prepared paste, and builds her vessel by coiling this cylinder around the form. The evolution of form in this Pueblo ware, by which a flat disk becomes a bowl, and from that are derived various forms of bottles and vases, has been well studied by Mr. Frank Cushing.